The bestselling author and CBC broadcaster Grant Lawrence discusses his new memoir Return to Solitude: More Desolation Sound Adventures with the Cougar Lady, Russell the Hermit, the Spaghetti Bandit and Others (Harbour Publishing, 2022), with Joseph Planta.

Return to Solitude: More Desolation Sound Adventures with the Cougar Lady, Russell the Hermit, the Spaghetti Bandit and Others by Grant Lawrence (Harbour Publishing, 2022). Click to buy this book from Amazon.ca: Return to Solitude

Text of introduction by Joseph Planta:

I am Planta: On the Line, in Vancouver, British Columbia, at TheCommentary.ca.

Grant Lawrence joins me again. The award-winning author and broadcaster has just published a new memoir Return to Solitude: More Desolation Sound Adventures with the Cougar Lady, Russell the Hermit, the Spaghetti Bandit and Others. It’s a followup to his bestselling and acclaimed book Adventures in Solitude, which he was first on the program with in 2010. He brings us back to Desolation Sound in British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast. We’re introduced once again to colourful, unforgettable characters that Grant knew growing up spending time with his family there summers. It’s an isolated place, one you can reach only by boat, so it attracts unique personalities. People who are wanting solace from the big city or escape from the law. People like the Cougar Lady was brought up there, and lived and worked off the land. Another character we meet again is Russell the Hermit, who had a profound effect on Grant’s life. We also meet Bernard the German, and a phantom-like squatter known as the Spaghetti Bandit. I’ll ask Grant about them, and writing their lives as it were in his books and broadcasting them on the radio. I’ll also get Grant to reflect on what Desolation Sound has meant to him in the decade or so since the first book, as he’s since gotten married and become a father of two children. Grant Lawrence’s previous books include The Lonely End of the Rink, Dirty Windshields, and a children’s book Bailey the Bat and the Tangled Moose. He is the winner of two BC Book Prizes, the first author who’s received the Bill Duthie Booksellers Choice award twice. The website for more is at www.grantlawrence.ca. This new book is from Harbour Publishing. Please welcome back to the Planta: On the Line program, Grant Lawrence; Mr. Lawrence, good morning.

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